Finally, some new sustenance for all those hungry piglets who’ve been loyally suckling on the Team Fortress 2 teat across these long, dry months. Robin ‘Genuine Australian’ Walker has snuck a titillating update onto the official TF2 blog, offering a few data-morsels about the upcoming Scout pack.
The key phrase is this: “balancing his replacement weapon has been very tricky due to large threat difference of the Scout between skilled and non-skilled hands.” Nothing especially revelatory in that, but it’s a foundation for enthusiastic theorisers to build upon.

As for the when, sounds like there’s two back-end updates due this week, and then the Scout pack will be the next priority. So let’s guess at a ‘soon.’ Hopefully there’ll be a new Meet The Team video to go with the update. We’ve got just Medic, Spy and Pyro left to go – perhaps the classes most rich with tragi-comic potential. Exciting!

http://csnation.totalgamingnetwork.com/viewnews.php/10545
“There is still some work going into the next update for Team Fortress 2. We were hoping to have this out this week, but with the extra testing we need to do, the update has been pushed back to early next week. This update will include the timeout fix during map change.”

I hope Meet the Pyro doesn’t resolve the little blast’s gender, 90% of the character’s charm would simply disappear, unless of course they were revealled to be asexual or simply a family of hamsters in a suit.

I was a little exited about achievements at first, but then I realized it was much more fun to pick that class’ anti-class.

Unlike so many others, I only care about achievements in that they actually mean something. So if I need so and so many achievements to get a good upgrade, then I’ll do them. If it means getting something useless, then I won’t care if I do or not.

The scout update idea irritates me slightly. I play as scout most of the time, he’s my favourite class, but I don’t want everyone else playing too, as he is very much a shoot and run character, not for everyone to play.

“I hope Meet the Pyro doesn’t resolve the little blast’s gender, 90% of the character’s charm would simply disappear, unless of course they were revealled to be asexual or simply a family of hamsters in a suit.”

Oh come on, you know Valve will just constantly cut away whenever you might learn the sex of the Pyro. They’re good at that kind of thing.

@Nighthood: Welcome to my life during the first two updates. (“Would you interns stop screwing around and start contributing to the game, please?” / “Don’t charge the Heavy. Don’t charge the sentry. Don’t- oh gods, you’re forcing me to play Demoman.”)

Although, from what I know of Scouting, the skill discrepancies should mean you’ll get to slaughter your newbly brethren en masse. (Until the Engineer cluster murders you all, of course.)

Whenever I think of the Pyro, I think of the scene in Star Wars when Vader’s having his helmet screwed on, only I imagine the back of a horse’s head. Like an anti-panto horse who gets dressed up in a human costume.

Bit disappointed Valve are trying to cater to bad players with TF2 now, although I’ll wait to see what the scattergun replacement is before final judgement. I also predict more demoman nerfs snuck in, but whatever they do it’ll never be enough to appease the people who just can’t admit a better player killed them.

I heard that this patch is going to address the issues of playing scout on pure defence teams. Interestingly I am having difficulty thinking of something that would work without changing what the scout is all about.

Playing as a RED scout is arguably easier than playing as a BLU scout because BLU will have fewer SG nests. RED scouts can run behind enemy lines, blow up tele entrances, harass snipers, and club heavies without worrying too much about SGs (most BLU SGs protect the engy’s tele exit)

The new unlocks will supposedly make the Scout more useful on payload maps, which didn’t exist when the class was first created. Thankfully Valve keeps evolving their games (for free!) instead of just abandoning them.

Sounds like this could be fun. I almost always play as sniper so the Pyro and Heavy updates were too much like shooting fish in a barrel to be fun. Before everyone jumps in with “I pwns snipers as scout”: a good scout is a pain in the arse to deal with as a sniper but an inexperienced scout is about as dangerous as a pot of humous and this will guarentee lots of badly played scouts.

Jahk, we’re actually almost guaranteed that escort maps will not appear ever. The basic concept was turned into payload, which is far more difficult to grief than escort. Ensuring a ‘dull but fair’ game as opposed to ‘exciting but inconsistent’ has pretty much been Valve’s mantra for the last few years. Don’t get me wrong, they’re my favourite devs out there, but some of the choices they’ve made to alleviate the concerns of the thick and/or completely rubbish players have pushed their games a little too far into ‘safe’ territory for me to be completely on-board.

It’s just unfortunate good payload games are so rare. You need two teams of almost exactly the same skill. The slightest imbalance can too easily result in a match with one side steamrollering the other.

I meant dull more in the sense of predictable. The cart will always go the same way and there is zero chance of a mad BLU rush from a side path to add some variety to the game. Engineers place their Sentries in the same bog-standard positions knowing that those positions are the best points to guard the cart’s route, Snipers all look in exactly the same direction, daring anyone to try to push the cart along the track, and there’s very little that can be done to alleviate this. Each game might not be dull – hell, Badwater can be great fun, especially as a Scout if there aren’t any obnoxiously-placed Sentry farms around – but it lacks long-term replayability compared to a human-guided Escort type.

I’m sure the same thing would happen with an escort mode once everyone got familiar on it. A small handful of strategies lead to success and months down the line they’re the only ones being used by experienced players.

As a mediocre player with occasional streaks of brilliance and occasional streaks of total suckitude, I greatly appreciate Valve’s efforts in that direction.

Otherwise I’d play TF2 as much as I play Counter-Strike, which is oh yeah NEVER.

It’s enough that a good player will dominate me to the point of frustration, without making it utterly impossible for me to ever have a chance of maybe killing somebody once in a while, scoring a few points here and there, and contributing to the team effort.

@ AlexW: re: predictability: i think valve have taken a step in the right direction toward less repetitive gameplay with left 4 dead & its randomised level content.

ideally what i’d love to see in some upcoming multiplayer shooter is level geometry that is procedurally varied from match to match – perhaps not to a huge extent – a permanent feeling of being lost would not be much fun. The basic layout of a level with major landmarks & topology could be kept constant, but smaller scale features could be varied wildly and force players to explore and adapt appropriate tactics every time.

i guess there might be a heap of balance problems – certainly since the latest left 4 dead patch, in versus mode the team playing survivor second on each stage gains a rather substantial advantage, since the locations of the most important events (witch! tank! guns here!) remain in the same spot as they did for the first team.

Payload is the best game mode in the best online FPS. Badwater is the best incarnation to date: it scales nicely to 32 players and regularly sees BLU reaching, though not necessarily capping, the third point (so few Gold Rush maps ever get past stage 1).

Hunted was fun every now and then in TFC rotation, but the hunted was usually an idiot. My current handle (OWNTforPrez) originated from those frustrating hunted rounds; I desperately wanted to be the prez so the team might have a chance of winning :D Allowing one person to grief 30 other people = bad.

@Rich_P: A solution to the Hunted griefing problem is to magic it away by having the hunted person be an AI: No fights over who gets to be them, consistent behaviour on their part, and no possibility of them griefing the team.

Of course you’d need a suitably smart AI: maybe mix some of the skill matching (and other team watching) smarts of the AI Director from l4d but dumb it down enough to follow when led into somewhere it *knows* is unsafe.

So, if it was being led, it’d just follow, maybe make some motions to tip it’s teammates off that there is a sniper nest in the next building, but if that’s subtle enough, and significantly toned down when skilled players are about – so it’s not something that you can rely upon – it’d make it a good learning exercise and consistently fun. Of course, if they’re left alone, having them be able to find cheatingly good cover quickly would be an asset. Having them stand in the middle of a room like a noob when left alone wouldn’t be optimal.

@Julian Calaby
I think that Valve had the exact same thinking as you. But then they realized that making the AI smart enough to not be a pain in the ass wouldn’t be worth the effort so they made the next obvious transition: the hunted moves along a set path only when team mates are around. Thus: payload.

I’m amazed with how long that Natascha bug has been around without them fixing it. I sort of feel like an idiot for having used it as much as I did in the past.

I just don’t see Valve investing in a complex AI system that will still be griefed by players. They left bots out of the game for a reason; TF2 is about humans vs. humans.

They should make a payload map with multiple tracks. Capturing a sub-point will switch the cart onto a shortcut track. Or blowing up a stack of chem vats will open a tunnel. The only downside is that such a system divides BLU’s attention; they won’t be focusing solely on the cart. Alternatively, the game can generate a different route each round.

Escort gameplay with different attack routes. Sounds like hunted to me.

Scout pack day one scout spam is my second worst fear in TF2. My worst is Spy pack day one spy spam. MY CLASS DAMMIT.

Looking forward to using this to get better at being the scout once everyone else has stopped playing him though. And getting some of the scout specific achievements that have already been released (the couple of medic ones for example)

Really looking forward to this. Been recently playing as the scout a fair bit and have gotten pretty good. Hopefully, I should be able to pick off a fair few of those newbie scouts when the patch is released.

It seems as if it has been a long time since a class update has been let out. I wonder if they will be releasing any surprises to go with it as they have done with the previous patches.

The class might as well play itself considering how little you need to do to be an effective engineer.

The engineer may be the most played class, but few can play it effectively. Look at the number of shitty offensive engineers, failing to move the gear up or upgrade teles or build frontline dispensers.

A good hardhat will help his buddy upgrade a gun to lvl 3 before building his own. Witness the number of MORONS who build SGs side-by-side.

Lots of engies leave themselves exposed to backstabs and quick-saps (I’m damn good at that combo), but the really good engies will stand with their back to a wall — not a dispenser — so spies can’t get them.

Keeping teles entrances alive is about the most frustrating part of being an engie. Enemy spies who decide to go exclusively anti-engie instead of back stabbing people on the frontline usually win the game for their team.

There’s nothing like dropping 4 level 3 entrances in the first 30 seconds of a round. I’ve got my Badwater attack route down to a science.

You can thank the spy buff (metal = cloak recharge) for making tele-sapping too easy. Prior to that, it took some real skill (and patience) to reach the enemy’s base. Valve thinks the spy’s cloaking mechanic is now ineffective (too many people can tell if you’re a spy), but I think the cloak recharge was an EZ buff that doesn’t get to the root of the problem.

Engineer must be difficult to play well, because there are so many hopeless engineers in the game. I’d say the ratio of failgineers to wingeneers is around 5:1, at least on the servers I play on. STOP BUILDING YOUR STUFF NEXT TO MINE. Gah.